On Tracing Memory
OPENING RECEPTION
Wednesday, January 21, 2025
InterAccess, 7 - 9PM
GALLERY HOURS
January 21 - February 21, 2026
Tuesday - Saturday, 11 - 6PM
32 Lisgar Street
On Tracing Memory considers memory as a method of inquiry into histories that are fragmented, unrecorded, or excluded from formal archival spaces. The work arises from attending to the artist's absences in personal history, and rather than attempting to fill these spaces with definitive facts or complete narratives, 2025 Media Arts Prize Winner Lauren Warrington approaches these gaps as sites of possibility, responding through a process of material fabulation, a practice of working with memory through speculative making that specifically emerges from stories and memories about three generations of women in the artist's family.
The body is treated as a permeable and transforming archive, able to critically engage with what remains of oral histories, remembered gestures, and second-hand memories. Objects and fragments of information are transformed into replica forms through digital and physical fabrication processes, iterating upon themselves as a generative process. Light boxes illuminate physical replicas, and an animated portal sculpture indexes images of oyster shells, tang yuan, and slippers through the artist’s cursor and body movement.
The work challenges fixed notions of authorship, opening space for new narratives and meanings that speak to diasporic identity. In this sense, the digital is a vital site of access where absence is rendered active and where speculative memory takes form.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lauren Warrington is an artist and researcher from Saskatoon who works with sculpture and digital space. Her practice is grounded in her experiences as a "mixed race" Chinese Canadian on the prairies and explores the complexities of how cultural memory is created, stored, and concealed, as well as the possibilities of its recontextualization through digital and physical forms. Through her work, she positions the body as an active site of memory and identity formation; it is both a repository and a medium through which diasporic identities are negotiated and expressed. Her research on archives and materiality challenges pre-existing historical narratives and reframes the significance of personal and collective memories, which move through bodies, objects, and spaces as critical sites of knowledge.
Warrington's practice contributes to a broader discourse on emerging technologies as sites of access and speculative infrastructures that have the potential to hold and transform cultural knowledge. Her installations consider how technological systems are mobilized to articulate diasporic subjectivities as layered, iterative, and moving. Through the interplay of virtual and material forms, she builds spaces that offer frameworks for continuous re-making, relationality, and narrative multiplicity.
Lauren holds a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Science in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of Saskatchewan. Lauren is also a founding member of Biofeedback Collective, a three-member artist collective focused on creating programming for underrepresented and emerging artists on the prairies.
Lauren Warrington is the 2025 winner of the InterAccess Media Arts Prize.
ABOUT THE INTERACCESS MEDIA ARTS PRIZE
Since 1990, the InterAccess Media Arts Prize has been granted annually to a graduating student whose work exhibits excellence and innovation in new media practice. Nominations are adjudicated by InterAccess's Programming Committee, who select a prize winner to be awarded a solo exhibition opportunity, a complimentary one-year studio membership, and professional development and mentorship. Finalists receive a complimentary one-year InterAccess studio membership and an opportunity for a public artist program.
Header image of Lauren Warrington, To Form a Pearl (TAI.PO.AR.1931.002,TAI.PO.AR.1931.003), 2024-2025. Ceramic, variable dimensions. Image courtesy of Toni Hafkenscheild.